The only other person who wasn't scared of me was my mother. She used to sit beside me in the back seat on long drives. Eight, nine years old. My father at the wheel, Elizabeth asleep against the window. My mother's hand on the leather between us. Close enough to feel the warmth. Never touching.
She knew what I was. Before the schools confirmed it with their tests and their careful language. Before the boarding school counselors started calling with concerns. She knew.
She never flinched. Never rearranged her face when I said something that sent other adults reaching for the phone. She'd just ask a follow-up question, as if it were anything a child might say. Why do you think you wanted to hurt him? What did it feel like when you did?
Elizabeth died at twelve. Cancer that moved faster than anyone expected. I stood at the funeral and felt the hollow where grief should go. My mother held my hand and I let her because she didn't expect me to cry.
My father started hitting her before I was old enough to stop it. By the time I was big enough, strong enough, I was six thousand miles away doing things for my country that I can't name in places that don't exist on official maps. She died before I got back.
A fall down the stairs, the report said. I read it in a tent that smelled like diesel. Sat there with the paper in my hands and nothing in my chest. My mother was dead. Frederick had killed her. I knew it before I finished reading. And I was on the other side of the world, unable to bring her back.
The diplomat's daughter died three days later. So did everyone else in that compound.
Two people in my life have looked at me without flinching. My mother, who understood what I was and never pulled away. And a monitor with a clipboard who asked me what the drugs feel like.
I don't want to kill Hope Turner.
I figure it out on the fifth day, after she's left and the cell smells like coconut lotion and burnt coffee. I want to open her up. Not her body. Her head. The place where the fear should live, the part that's broken or missing or built wrong. I want to find what lets her sit in that chair, know what I am, and ask if I'm eating or how I slept.
It doesn't make sense.
This isn't tenderness. I'm not built for it. I just want to know why she isn't scared. Everyone else is. She's not. I need to know why.
The sixth session, she asks about my childhood. I tell her about the schools—the testing, the assessments, the concerned professionals who recommended increasingly restrictive environments. She doesn't flinch when I describe the boy I hurt at the third boarding school, the one who stopped walking right afterward.
"Did anyone explain what the assessments found?" she asks.
"They explained it to my parents. My father explained it to me with his belt."
Her pen pauses. Just for a second. "That's not in your file."
"No. It wouldn't be."
She makes a note. I watch her hand move across the page and wonder what she's writing. What version of me exists in those neat, left-slanting letters.
"Same time tomorrow?"
"I have a thing at ten, but I can probably move it."
"Was that a joke?"
"Was it funny?"
The corner of her mouth twitches. She doesn't let herself smile, but I see it. I'm still thinking about it after she leaves.
Three years they've drugged me to keep me from wanting anything. It worked. The chemical fog dulled everything—hunger, anger, the edge that used to keep me sharp. They buried me in sedation and thought they'd won.
But the dose doesn't do what they think it does.
It slows me down. Blurs the edges. Makes my body heavy and uncooperative. But it doesn't kill what's underneath. The wanting is still there.
It's been buried so long I almost forgot what it felt like.
I lie on the thin vinyl mattress after she leaves and I keep track of it: her voice when she says my name. The pen click before she opens the clipboard. The smell of her that stays in my cell for an hour after she's gone.
Fixation. That's what I tell myself. The need to understand her. I'm fixated on the puzzle she presents. The woman who doesn't react the way everyone else does.
But there's more to it than that, and I know it. This has nothing to do with understanding. I want her to come back. I want her to keep coming back. I want to know what she sounds like when she's not being professional, what her face looks like when she laughs for real, what it would feel like to say her name out loud the way I keep saying it in my head.
